What's New
BY Sarah Patterson June 3, 2026
What's New February 19, 2026
Hot Tomato knocked off-air
Reporter
Gold Coast techs were left scrambling last night, when ARN’s Hot Tomato was knocked off-air.
Locals also reported their TV signal had been lost.
Hot Tomato posted to social media, urging listeners to listen via the iHeart App whilst techs worked on the problem.
“OH NO! Someone has unplugged the dongle that goes into the what-cha-mah-call-it and has taken us off the air.”
The station has since confirmed it was a power issue at Mount Tambourine, cutting all local radio and TV services for about an hour.
Hot Tomato’s tech Ryan was first on site, and helped make sure the Goldy was switched back on!
Station CD Brendon ‘Whippy’ Dangar said “Hot Tomato was the only local broadcaster to notify the audience via socials to listen on the iHeart app – a reminder of our strength: our local team in content and engineering working 24/7.”
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What's New
BY Sarah Patterson June 3, 2026
This is what happens when you leave the transmission side to a third party – who ultimately don’t care about broadcast continuity. While it’s convenient for broadcast companies to use these tower / transmission firms – it ultimately leads to longer downtime of services – which should really be looked at by the regulator.
Can we get an article like this each time Max FM Taree goes off air?
To be fair, everyone including SCA, ARN, Community Radio, DAB+ and Digital TV were off air that are on the Mt Tambo site too, not just the mighty Hot Tomato.
TXA suffered a faulty changeover from a <7 sec power outage on their new electrical system.
I assisted TXA and we got the site backup within the hour. A bit of unplanned Wednesday night adventure!
@Max: And the sad thing is, like most regional SRN/BOG stations there is no way to stream the station online…in 2026.
More on the playout side of things, I know but what should be the network flagship 2SM has also had a fair amount of dead air of late: A Weather Update was missed last night while two ad breaks failed to make it to air on Tuesday/Wednesday – you could faintly hear the breaks for the station which actually seems to be the network flagship on DAB+!
“This is Sydney’s Newcastle Station, 2SM 1269” – what probably should be used as a Station ID, given the amount of content relayed from up North outside of peak weekday shifts.
Almost like placing every broadcast service transmission in the one location with the same power source and backup is a single point of failure. Shocked.